Hungarian food in Hollywood: what a Romanian counter has
We are a Romanian counter, not a Hungarian one. That is the honest start, and the rest of this only reads properly after it. What we do have is Transylvania, where the two tables have passed dishes back and forth for centuries, and that overlap is sitting on the menu right now.
Start with langoș. A round of yeast dough stretched by hand and fried to order until it puffs and blisters, brushed with garlic, plain with salt or under sour cream and grated cheese. Eight dollars either way. Hungarian by birth, Transylvanian by habit, which is the description of most of this list.
Gulaș is on the soup list. Beef cubes simmered slow with onion, potatoes, carrots and sweet paprika, with flour dumplings pinched into the pot, $16 for twenty ounces. It comes thick, closer to a stew than to a broth.
The case out front is where paprika does the most work. Dry smoked sausage, pork with garlic and paprika, tied by hand in hog casing and smoked slow over hardwood, $20 a pound. The hot one is thinner, in sheep casing, with hot paprika and chili, $22. Slănină afumată, smoked fatback, salted for days and rubbed with garlic and paprika before it goes into the smoke, $18 a pound, eaten sliced thin with raw onion and bread. A Hungarian reads that as szalonna and needs no further explanation.
Two more from the same case. Jumări, pork fat and skin rendered slow until crisp and salted while hot, $25 a pound, which is töpörtyű under another name. And ciolan afumat, smoked pork knuckle, $12 a pound, the thing that goes into a pot of beans or a pot of sauerkraut.
We smoke the meat in the house, over hardwood, and it is cut and wrapped by the pound at the counter. Nothing in that case is pre-packed. Point at what you want, say how much you want, and watch the scale.
For sweets there are two you will recognize on sight. Doboș, six thin sponge layers with chocolate buttercream between them and a sheet of hard caramel on top, $9 a slice. Cremeș, which is krémes with a Romanian spelling, two sheets of puff pastry around a thick layer of vanilla custard and dusted with sugar, $4.50. Tăiței cu mac, wide egg noodles tossed with sugar and ground poppy seed, are $8.
What we do not have is a Hungarian kitchen, and nobody here is going to dress it up as one. The soups are ciorbe, soured with lemon juice and vinegar. The plates are mici, grilled minced meat rolls, sarmale, cabbage rolls with mămăligă, and șnițel, a cutlet pounded thin and fried. If you were looking for a Hungarian restaurant, what you have found is a Romanian one with a Transylvanian half that will feel familiar from the first bite.
Order ahead on the menu and pick it up at 422 S Dixie Hwy in Hollywood. Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. Sunday, 10 AM to 4 PM. Monday the doors are shut, because Monday the smokehouse rests. Hours and directions are kept in one place.
If you knew this address as Artisan Deli, the counter is where it was. We made the mici and the sausage that were sold here, and the counter is ours now. The short version is here.
Come for the langoș. It is fried when you order it and it is worth eating standing up, while it is still too hot to be sensible about. The rest of the list will keep.